7
I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the children to die on the cold floor.
IN ACCORDANCE WITH MY mother’s request, I buy a ticket to Denver for three weeks from now. It will be my first visit since she moved into her new house, and I’m hopeful that a certain amount of hometown-boy-made-good triumph will accrue. I fantasize about taking my mom out to an expensive restaurant and being waited on by Graham Neale, although the fantasy loses some luster when I realize that in it I am twenty-four years old and still having dinner with my mom.
During the interim between the purchase of the ticket and the flight, Maya and I entrench certain small routines that gently downgrade the time we spend together from Event status to Normal status. We figure out all the basic stage-two stuff — minor arguments, watching television — until being with her starts to feel almost easy, apart from when we’re having sex. When she straddles me in the darkness, her diminutive silhouette transforms from that of an adult woman to that of a child and back again. I conceal her behind looped mental footage of anonymous copulation. My performance, assessed on metrics both intrinsic (stamina, turnaround time) and extrinsic (partner satisfaction), is more than adequate, perhaps a personal best. Afterward she becomes giggly and playful, and I try to join in the fun. The wave of guilt that threatens to suffocate me usually dissipates after about forty-five minutes.
Until, huddled under her blankets one freezing night, we fall into the spoon position, which maximizes body contact and preserves our pocket of warm air. I slide my hand under her T-shirt, brush it against her nipples.
“How does that feel?” I say. She murmurs something soft. “Is that OK? Can I touch you there?”
“Yes, you can,” she says. She doesn’t sound surprised that I’m asking permission to do something I’ve been doing for weeks.
I ask again and slide my hand between her legs. “Yes,” she says again. This ritualized exchange — permission requested and granted, requested and granted — overrides my internal monologue. I remember something Lauren said: “I’m so scared I make it like I’m not even there at all.” Speaking to each other keeps us conscious, and this consciousness rescues me from Maya’s father’s lingering presence. “Can I fuck you?” I ask her, when the moment seems right, and she says, “Yes, fuck me,” and it’s everything her first forced couplings were not: mature, consensual, mutual. At the end I’m filled with all three of nature’s greatest satisfactions — love, orgasm, and the discovery of a solution to a difficult problem.
“You know the guy who drives the snowplow to clear the roads?” she says a minute later. “How does he get to work?”
“Nice point,” I say. I have picked up some of her locutions. Then I wrap my arms around her shoulders and squeeze her so hard I’m afraid she might break.
Maya drives through the early evening traffic with the controlled aggression of an adept video gamer. The Golden Gate Bridge — more famous and less useful than the Bay Bridge — is inside a raincloud, and the lanes are narrow and poorly marked, and she’s driving a little closer to the pickup truck in front than I would. Aunt Veal offered to take us out to dinner in the city, but Maya wanted to drive up to her house in Corte Madera; she described the forty-five-minute journey as a road trip. But the spirit of adventure seems to have left her, and the CDs she chose sit unplayed in the glove compartment. Aunt Veal is the only relative with whom Maya is still in contact, and so dinner tonight carries a burden of unfulfillable wishes. Tomorrow I fly to Denver for my mother’s birthday.
Off the freeway, Maya winds her way up a series of complicated hillside roads, past houses that become increasingly eccentric the higher we go. Corrugated-metal shacks and solar-paneled ecotopias nestle next to cliff-hanging glass-fronted dream homes. She pulls up in front of a miniature ranch house with something provisional about its construction, as though it were a sketch for a house to be built elsewhere.
Maya has described Aunt Veal as a hippie, which led me to expect a bosomy earth mother. But the woman who stands in the doorframe holding the screen open is skinny and angular, all nose and elbows. She wears clunky metal jewelry and a complicated black garment with a low neckline that displays the broad gulf of her cleavage. Her real name is Gail; the nickname derives from a speech she once made in a restaurant describing to five-year-old Maya how her mother’s osso buco had been raised and slaughtered, a speech to which Maya responded with fascination rather than outrage.
“C’mon in, you guys,” she says, as though we lived up the road and came for dinner once a week. The front door leads oddly into the kitchen, which opens to an underfurnished living room with a view of dirt and cedars. The house smells of creosote and dog. “So you’re the computer geek, huh?” she says, to see if I’ll take offense.
“Actually, we prefer the term socially maladjusted technology adept,” I say.
She smiles marginally. “I used to date a guy who worked in the computer lab at Stanford,” she says, the college’s name provoking in me, as always, a burst of regret. “Nowadays computers are a business thing, or a toy gun, but originally they were a way to expand your mind.”
“Sure,” I say, because what else can you say when someone tells you something you already know?
We sit in canvas chairs on a deck overlooking the shallow canyon and eat stir-fried vegetables. Aunt Veal rests her feet on a large, senile golden retriever. The hot tub, mercifully, remains covered. We talk about my company, and about what I’m planning to do with all the money I’ve made. Aunt Veal suggests I start a foundation, one that would form the basis of “a real antiwar movement.”
“Hey, I’m not Bill Gates,” I say. “I could barely pay the overhead on a foundation.”
This doesn’t satisfy Aunt Veal, who seems to be imagining herself as director of her own foundation. “It’s up to you to keep him honest, hon,” she says to Maya.
“Oh, I do,” Maya says, getting up to use the bathroom.
It’s not clear how much privacy Maya’s absence affords us, since the bathroom shares a wall with the deck, but Aunt Veal nevertheless shifts into a confidential tone. “So,” she says, “you’re serious about my niece?”
“I’m just trying not to scare her off.”
“Because she’s been through some rough stuff.”
“I know,” I say. “I think she’s incredibly brave.” This is one of those true things that come out sounding insincere. The exchange is cut off by the toilet flushing, and we wait in silence for Maya to return.
When our plates are empty and resting on the deck next to our chairs, Aunt Veal produces a tin from which she withdraws a pipe, a lighter, and a little pouch full of marijuana. Maya’s smile is familiar and mildly exasperated. Aunt Veal prepares the bowl and takes a couple of long, profligate tokes that suggest a big stash and a secure connection. When she has exhaled for the third time, she offers me the pipe.
My chief experiences with marijuana, as with most drugs, came via Danny Keach, who during his first year at CU-Boulder brought various narcotics back to Denver every few weeks. I think he felt inexperienced at college and liked having me to initiate. Under his auspices I took mushrooms, which were interesting, and Ecstasy, which seemed to solve some deep flaw in my character, but I never saw the point of marijuana: I have no desire to focus more deeply on my involuted thoughts. But I’m a guest in Aunt Veal’s house, and the offer of a pipe is an archetypically friendly gesture, so I take a small hit and let it out quickly. I don’t even feel it. I extend the pipe to Maya, but she just wrinkles her nose. Aunt Veal takes it instead and says to Maya, “Shouldn’t even break it out around you.”